Brain power

April 18, 2005 — 10.00am

Lists of public intellectuals often contain the usual suspects, but now the trend is towards showbiz rather than academia. Shane Green and David Rood report.

Clare Wright could detect the slight chill that had settled around the department. The 33-year-old La Trobe University historian had just finished her PhD and had signed up a literary agent to get the manuscript published.

"I would have middle-aged male academics looking down their noses at me around the photocopier, saying 'You're very entrepreneurial, aren't you?' with this sense that it was not quite cricket to go outside the academy itself to get along," she says.

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It was the kind of "professional scepticism" - she rejects the word jealousy - that Wright has become accustomed to as she has embarked on a media career in tandem with her academic one.

She's the author of Beyond the Ladies Lounge, exploring the role of women publicans in Australia, which has just sold out its first print run.

Then there is her three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at La Trobe, completing Eureka's Women: An Intimate History of Sex, Class and Culture on the Victorian Goldfields.

But beyond the written word she has another life: that of the public - even celebrity - intellectual.

The media loves Clare Wright: young, attractive and articulate, she defies the image of the leather-patched, dusty historian.

She's a panellist on the ABC's The Einstein Factor and a radio regular. During last year's 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade, she did 10 national interviews - "I give good radio", she jokes.

Every few years, Australia seeks to identify the nation's intellectuals, an exercise that acts as a barometer measuring the state of our intellectual health.

In 1997, writer and broadcaster Robert Dessaix presented a 13-part series on public intellectuals for ABC Radio National. Former ALP national president Barry Jones has often bemoaned the decline of the public intellectual.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the cult of the celebrity intellectual - led by the likes of Stephen Hawking and historian Simon Schama of The History of Britain television series fame - has been on the rise.

In more recent years, a significant body of academic work has emerged in Australia about the concept of the public intellectual.

Like an AFL coach reeling off a list of best players, invariably the Australian rollcall of public intellectuals includes usual suspects - like Blainey, Manne and Singer.

But increasingly, a new breed of public intellectual is emerging, often - as in Wright's case- from the academy but sometimes from unlikely places such as television or theatre.

Take the list of 20 featured on this page. Barry Humphries and Andrew Denton sit alongside more "traditional" choices.

In more conservative quarters, this will inevitably raise discerning but dismissive eyebrows. Yet their inclusion is justified, as their intellectual contribution generates ideas and informs issues that shape how we see ourselves and Australian society.

In many ways, Clare Wright's profile-generating approach is a reflection of changing times.

The way Wright sees it, young scholars have to be able to launch themselves into the wider world without the apparatus that older academics have - eminence.

"I don't mean that they just sit there long enough to become well-known, but having tenured academic jobs for decades has provided a base for being able to do research and writing . . . people like Robert Manne or Stuart Macintyre or Geoffrey Blainey," she says.

"Their careers have all been nurtured in the secure environment and workplace structures of the academy."

It is a sense of celebrity that comes from longevity and authority, she says.

In his 1997 book, Gangland - cultural elites and the new generationalism, Mark Davis laments the limited space given to young voices in the Australian media.

Davis wrote of an older generation of experts and intellectuals - from Laurie Oakes to Germaine Greer - as having "permanent tenure'' as young writers, journalists and commentators suffer a prolonged "enforced adolescence''.

Similiarly, if you're a young scholar, Wright argues, you can't rely on longevity and eminence.

"Particularly if you're a young female scholar, you have even more issues of authority to grapple with," Wright argues.

"In a way, you have to create a profile for yourself so that people listen to what you've got to say."

So Wright has done just that, among a new group of younger, predominantly female academics who are at the forefront of public debate - including Catharine Lumby and Leslie Cannold.

But Andrew Denton? How could somebody many regard as an entertainer assume status as a public intellectual?

Denton certainly qualifies in the criteria adopted by Tania Lewis, a leading Australian voice on the subject of public intellectuals. Dr Lewis, a research fellow at Melbourne University's Centre for the Study of Health and Society, has coined the phrase the "celebrity intellectual".

She believes there has been a profound shift in the way in which the authority of the intellectual is defined in contemporary Western countries such as Australia.

In an essay published last year in David Carter's The Ideas Market: An alternative take on Australia's intellectual life, Lewis says there has been a "blurring of boundaries" between intellectuals, experts, the presenter/host and celebrities on TV.

"Ordinary people are also increasingly being given the authority to speak on television although this authority tends to be passed to them by a TV personality, whether an expert or presenter," she writes.

"Figures like Andrew Denton thus can be seen to be increasingly playing the role of interpretative intellectual, translating between expert and ordinary knowledge and providing the space for different voices to be heard within the televisual sphere."

Lewis is well aware of the minefield of defining an intellectual. "Within the academy and without, there's a lot of debate over what the term exactly means."

She says she found "a hundred definitions" , of which many were politically loaded.

"It seems to me that it means different things to different groups, and it is used strategically to support different kinds of approaches to culture. Within the academy, it would be very much about the types of knowledge you're talking about," Lewis says.

Over three decades - from editing Quadrant to the Demidenko literary scandal and the stolen generation - Robert Manne has been a player in and observer of public debate.

But in recent years he has noticed the idea of the public intellectual changing, as the old-school connection between the intellectual and authority is fading.

The shift has been driven by a change in what society means when it uses the word "public" and the kinds of people who influence public debate and sensibility, Manne argues.

"Intellectual has always had the idea of engagement. It used to be the idea of engagement of those who were scholars or theoreticians with an interest in the present and the public," says the La Trobe University politics professor and Age opinion writer.

"Now it's people who affect the present and the public through a much wider range of writing and thinking and speaking."

The concept of the intellectual as an engaged scholar - weighed down with academic and theoretical baggage - has changed.

"It (intellectual) is now used to mean people who comment interestingly on public affairs; thus you can get people like Andrew Denton, who 20 years ago, no one would have thought of as an intellectual," Manne says.

Comfortable with Denton's place alongside Blainey, Manne admits he has moved with the times. He acknowledges there has been a slippage in the notion of the public intellectual, but not necessarily a devaluing of the term.

Few people interviewed for Dessaix's radio series and subsequent book, Speaking their minds: Intellectuals and the Public Culture in Australia, identified themselves as public intellectuals.

Rather, Manne now talks about a more democratic idea as a larger group of people has gained purchase on public debate.

"I think of certain people who once would have been thought of as novelists or writers as public intellectuals because they do change what I think of as the sensibility of society," Manne says.

"Helen Garner is someone I regard now as a public intellectual because both The First Stone and the more recent Joe Cinque's Consolation have led people to think a great deal about either questions to do with feminism or questions to do with ethics and judgement."

The "democratisation" of the public intellectual is not simply populist commentary or about having an immediate impact on daily politics, Manne says, but about values and judgements on deeper things.

"I would only include people whose contribution is at a level of depth, not necessarily theoretical, which isn't shallow. I would never, for example, include people who have a greater impact on public opinion, like John Laws or Alan Jones," he says.

In 2002, British historian Simon Schama signed a £3 million deal for two television series and three books on the history of migration between America and Britain.

Schama, now a professor of art history at New York's Columbia University, made his public name as author and presenter of the 16-part television BBC series The History of Britain.

Australia may not have the cult of the celebrity academic in the mould of Schama, but Melbourne University historian Stuart Macintyre says visiting academics have commented that history as a profession, and certainly historical issues, have a greater profile in Australia than in Britain.

"No, we don't have the same television and electronic media... but someone like Henry Reynolds has more salience in Australia than Simon Schama would have in Britain."

Earlier this year, Macintyre, who is dean of arts at Melbourne University, was asked to compile a list of Australia's top intellectuals for The Sydney Morning Herald. He struggled to get to the 10 required. The category isn't as precise as people might think, he says.

For Macintyre the stumbling block centres on definition. Is the public intellectual a descriptive term for people who can be regarded as intellectuals and have a public profile? Or are they people who are significant intellectuals who also play a public role?

The shorthand test, Macintyre says, is whether they make some sort of distinctive contribution through their work and ideas. A descriptive as well as an evaluative definition.

"A public intellectual works significantly as an intellectual in a way that becomes part of public awareness," Macintyre says.

"The impact and interest of their ideas is quite substantial outside their academic workplace, and if not there is a demonstrable impact of their ideas and arguments."

By Macintyre's own criteria, this "manifestly" includes Geoffrey Blainey - whose phrases have entered the popular vocabulary - and Peter Singer. (Macintyre, who is one of the first named on most lists of public intellectuals, modestly puts himself in the "second 11".)

The public intellectual of France or Britain - the earlier public intellectual - was working at a slightly higher level of public activity than Andrew Denton - as much an entertainer as anything else, Macintyre says.

Does it say something about public culture, he questions, that we now expect our intellectuals to amuse us as well?

In history departments across Australia, the photocopier serves as the office water cooler. Clare Wright can deal with scepticism about her profile that some see as "uncollegial". But since the publication of her PhD, she has been conscious of reaching a wider audience.

"It was never enough for me, the idea that my supervisor, two examiners and my mum would read something that I'd spent six years working on; that, to me, seems a fairly ludicrous prospect," she says.

CELEBRITY INTELLECTUALS: HOW WE CHOSE THEM

There are more definitions of intellectuals than there are intellectuals. In previous debates, Australians excelled at guidelines so narrow that hardly anyone qualified.

But things have changed, and today more inclusive definitions increasingly include the roles of performance and celebrity - and those from beyond the academic world.

So this, then, is our list - like all lists, it will be invariably contentious. The basic criteria is someone who works with ideas or whose contribution to issues affects how Australian society sees and understands itself.

Not, as Robert Manne has described, simply experts who translate scholarly knowledge for the public but those who "affect our public sensibility". Politicians and advocates do not qualify.

Our 20 celebrity heads1. PROFESSOR ROBERT MANNE: Professor of politics, LaTrobe University; author and opinion writer on public affairs, international relations, history and political culture.2.PROFESSOR GEOFFREY BLAINEY: Historian and author of 32 books. Taught at the University of Melbourne and chaired the Australia Council from 1977 to 1981.3. PROFESSOR CATHARINE LUMBY: Director of Sydney University's media and communications; feminist commentator, writer, columnist; Phd Macquarie University.4. PROFESSOR PETER SINGER: Professor of bioethics, Princeton University and laureate Professor, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne; MA, University of Melbourne.5.PROFESSOR DENNIS ALTMAN: Professor of politics, La Trobe University, and chair of Australian Studies, Harvard University; MA Cornell University.6. PROFESSOR STUART MACINTYRE: Historian and Dean of Melbourne University arts faculty; PhD, Cambridge University.7. ANDREW DENTON: Writer, radio and television personality turned talkshow host; BA (communications), Charles Sturt University; winner, Sale Of The Century Comedy Challenge, 1993.8. DR TIM FLANNERY: Professor, University of Adelaide; prize-winning scientist and author on conservation, the environment and population control. PhD, University of NSW.9. PHILLIP ADAMS: broadcaster, writer, filmmaker.10. DR INGA CLENDINNEN: writer and historian; D. Litt and emeritus scholar, La Trobe University.11. BARRY HUMPHRIES: Satirist, actor, writer and self-confessed university drop-out.12. DR GERMAINE GREER: Broadcaster, journalist, columnist and reviewer. PhD, Cambridge University.13. DR DON WATSON: Speech, script and dialogue writer; PhD, Monash University;former speechwriter for former Victorian premier John Cain and former prime minister Paul Keating; campaigner against corporate language.14. HELEN GARNER: writer; journalist; critic; arts degree (honours), University of Melbourne.15. DAVID WILLIAMSON: playwright; bachelor of engineering, Monash University.16.PROFESSOR GUSTAV NOSSAL: medical scientist and immunologist; PhD, University of Melbourne; Australian of the Year, 2000.17. PROFESSOR PETER DOHERTY: laureate professor, University of Melbourne's department of microbiology and immunology ; PhD, University of Edinburgh medical school; Australian of the Year, 1997; joint-winner 1996 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.18. DR LESLIE CANNOLD: Bioethicist; researcher; writer; media commentator; research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne; PhD, Education (Melbourne).19. PROFESSOR HENRY REYNOLDS: historian, writer; D. Litt, James Cook University; senior research fellow, Australian Research Council; research professor, University of Tasmania.20. DR CLARE WRIGHT: Historian working in politics, academia and the media. PhD(Australian Studies), University of Melbourne.